Twenty-eight years later, on Earth, an astronomer comparing recent plates taken of the constellation Lyra noticed that Vega, its brightest star, had increased in brightness by a slight amount. The event was not especially remarkable--there are on the average, twenty-five novas reported every year in our galaxy--but Vega was one of the stars to be visited during the next decade by one of the Survey ships now in mid-voyage. "There's one place they won't have to stop, now," he said to a colleague, showing him the plates. "I don't suppose it matters. What's one star, more or less, when they all turn out to be the same--no planets, or barren ones--no stopping place for man." "I suppose you're right," said the astronomer, staring glumly at the waste immensity of the photograph in front of him.